Lines
by livingonakiwi
Summary: "Our lines had crossed too many times to be untangled." One shot. Warning: Some swearing, subtle dark themes. Rated T for safety. Based after a conversation that might have happened after Brendan hit Ste in March 2013, revealing about his abusive past at the hands of his father. Ste's POV. Descriptive of his feeling towards Brendan after the painful truth.


Warning: One swear word used. Subtle themes of darkness.

Based after the episode where Brendan hit Ste, after Ste compared Brendan to his father. This is what I hoped would happen in an alternate life. Brendan never got hold up by Maxine, he doesn't know Walker is back. He reveals all about his abusive past with his father to Stephen.

This is after a conversation they might have had.

* * *

I dragged my limp body out of my cold and empty bed, the covers falling on to the dirty, cream carpet below. Perhaps the warmth that radiated from hell beneath would heat them; perhaps the devil could keep me company in my bed tonight, his fiery arms surrounding me as I slip into my numbing slumber.

Dragging my feet across the ground, I stopped beside the door. His heart-wrenching sobs came quicker now and I'd never heard a sound more desperate and broken. I'd never heard him so desolate and terrified. His deep Irish drawl soaked through the thin wood of the door, like the river of pain that ran from his eyes cascaded through its weakening cracks and etched itself into my skin. Involuntarily, I itched at my wrist. It was only getting colder in this darkening room.

As he continued to speak, his words bled like ink through my ears, my brain swimming in a thousand lexis of twenty years of pent-up, ruined innocence. Brendan wasn't a monster, I could see that now. No, Brendan was still that broken little eight-year-old boy: knees pulled up close to his quivering, heavy chest; his used-and-disposed-of body shivering in the lonely and frightening, freezing Dublin night that seeped through the curtains. Inside he was still the little boy who cried himself to sleep with silent tears, every single night since the first.

My legs collapsed beneath me, my back braced against the wall. It filled me completely, every tock of the ticking clock, and in this infinite moment of honesty and loss, separated by a thin wooden door, there was no distance enough to divide us. We became each other. Each beat of a breaking heart echoing in unison; erratic pulses a side effect of the same; aching limbs and throbbing temples a symptom of the shared truth. His tears were my tears and his love was my love. Our need the type that tears one apart from the very core until fulfilled.

My clammy palm closed tightly around the handle, pulling down slowly and allowing the rusting hinges to adjust to the weight of my dependent body. It creaked open, my heart simultaneously imploding with the impossibility of the sight.

Brendan's body was slumped against the door frame with his raw, red eyes facing me. His shoulders quivered, a great roar of emotion threatening to escape. His knees were tucked up to his chest: foetal and defeated; my Brendan, a shell whose infinite cracks were no longer hidden by blood-soaked bandages of lies and deceit. He had stripped himself of his façade, and everything came crashing down.

"I'm so sorry," he breathed, chest heaving, beads of cold sweat forming on his creased forehead.

The bitter air from the open door flushed us through skin and bone. This man, a ghostly apparition in the hallway, appeared a mere shadow of his former glory. I held my shallow breath in my aching lungs.

"I know," I whispered in return, and I did know.

There were a million and one things within his soul that reflected in the turbulent storm of his eyes tonight: flashes of regret and remorse like lightning strikes that flashed a blinding white; a childhood nightmare that ripped him apart like the parasitic nails of a monster, spreading it's disease, leaving behind its irremovable stain.

I reached out tentatively and stroked his blushing cheek, the heat of his tears burning the tips of my freezing fingers. I stroked gently, testing his instability. Doubt flashed across my mind, yet he did not pull away, so neither did I. And so I reached closer, lifting my body until I was on my knees. I wrapped my arms gently around his neck and pulled him tight into my embrace.

His arms snaked around my waist, face nesting in the crook of my neck. I'd never been held so closely in all my life. He held me like he loved me, like he was afraid to lose me; he held me so tight in that moment it was as though he was holding the two broken hemispheres of my being together. Love has its way of doing that sometime, I'd found. It has its way of becoming and undoing an existential crisis all at once, and it fucking hurt.

He looked up at me with heavy, hooded eyes and caught his breath. "It hurts, Stephen," he sighed.

"It's okay to let it out, Bren. Just let it go. It's okay, just let go." A tortured whimper was a stain on his lips. "I love you, and I'm not going anywhere. I'm here. We'll get through this, together."

All at once, it seemed like every last string that remained intact inside of him snapped. Burying his teeth into the bone of my shoulder and screamed, the vibration of his frustration and anger rippling through my flesh. We were one in the same, him and I. There was no denying our lines had crossed too many times to be untangled.

There comes a time in every person's life when they must question their existence. Lying there, on that homely mattress, so many words said and so many still a secret; so many possible chances for a make or break it life, I'd finally found the answer. The only reason that I had ever existed was for the man who lay safe in my arms, because without him, I myself am nothing. Without Brendan, I never would have known of love, of _true_ love. Without him, my world would never have known such beauty and the good in this world, even when his anger begets him. Neither her nor I could find the beginning or end of where our lines separated.

Lying here, on these hell-warmed sheets, the devil's son wrapped perfectly around me, I wondered if our lines had crossed so many times that we had eventually become one.

* * *

Thank you.


End file.
